How to Do Keyword Research For Your Niche Affiliate Website

In order to promote a business and earn money from sales, one needs to attract as many visitors or prospects as possible.

This is true for both traditional and work at home business.

You may have the best product and you might have signed up for the best affiliate programs, but if you do not attract massive traffic to your website, then there is no way that you earnings will boost significantly.

Your efforts to work from home online might just be all in vain.

One of the ways to promote your site is through effective keyword research and usage.

Keyword research is the foundation of any good website.In fact, it can make or break your entire project. So how do you find profitable keywords?

Find Keywords and Identify Demand

When doing keyword research, you have to find out how many searches are made every month for the keyword you choose.

Be aware that any keyword that has zero searches has no chance of becoming profitable.

However, anything from 1,000 searches monthly can lead to good traffic and income. These figures are just a rough estimate – they can be lower or higher depending on the niche you choose.

To identify the demand of your chosen keyword, you can use Google AdWords Keyword Tool for free.

Type in your keyword, check on “exact” keyword and find out how many people are searching for the exact phrase.

Having enough people search for your keywords can be a good indication that the website can survive online by serving topic-related advertisements.

Spy on the Competition for That Keyword

Another factor that can affect your earnings with online marketing is the number of competitions you have for every keyword or phrase you are targeting.

The easiest way to find out the exact number of keyword competition is through Google.

Just type in your keyword within quotation marks (“Like This”), enter and look below the search bar to find a number similar to “About 1,240,000 results.”

A highly competitive keyword may not be worth your time since the effort and money you spend for getting traffic to the website and ranking on search engines can be pretty expensive.

If you don’t have the money to launch a pay-per-click campaign, then it’s best to go with keywords that have little or no competition.

Long Tail Keywords and Micro Niches

Many internet marketing experts recommend staying away from crowded niches, but an effective workaround with this advice is to target long tail keywords and start micro niche websites.

A micro niche is a specific niche within a general niche.

If you wish to target “debt relief”, then a micro niche like “debt relief for unemployed”, or “debt relief for single moms” would be acceptable micro niches.

There is no limit to sub-topics you can think of, even in the most popular niches.

Long tail keywords are keywords related to the main keyword.

If you went with debt relief for unemployed, sample of long tail keywords that could fit your micro niche are “debt relief for unemployed single moms”,“debt repayments for unemployed” or “debt relief for newly unemployed people”.

Since these keywords are related to the main niche, each set of long tail keywords come with a particular target audience.

The next step in the process is to click on the “get keyword ideas” tab and Google will generate a healthy list of alternative keywords that you can sort through to determine their viability.

Just look at the Google figures on overall competitiveness for the specific keyword and how many times people entered it into the search engines monthly.

As with everything in internet marketing, the more targeted visitors your website receives, the higher your chances of earning either through affiliate links or advertisements.

That targeted traffic comes via the keywords you choose and target with your promotions so choose carefully and choose profitable ones.

The idea behind proper Keyword research is to find a niche market that has existing demand and competition as well as available product, but not too competitive that your Keywords will never rank highly in the search engines.

It is important to remember that the keywords for your niche must have an audience.

Keywords should always generate a relatively good amount of traffic.

Many marketers try to use popular keywords that are off the well beaten path, so to speak, but still generate a large enough audience to produce a good flow of sales.